March 11, 2026 
It was supposed to be a mini-break—a weeklong vacation in Dubai. Then the missiles started falling.
Canadian show jumper Graham Williamson and his wife, Jennifer, followed their 18-year-old son, Locklyn, to Spain this winter to compete on the Sunshine Tour. Looking to escape for a few days of sun during the off week, they booked a flight to one of the busiest and most multicultural cities in the world.
“It had been pouring rain, like worse than Vancouver rain,” said Graham. “So my wife and I said, ‘Well, let’s go to Dubai.’ It’s only a seven-hour quick flight and it has the nicest weather. We’ve been there a lot before.”
The Williamsons booked a room at their usual hotel, the Fairmont on the Palm. They were having lunch with a friend below the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, when news broke of the coordinated U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran.
“We didn’t really think too much of it,” continued the BC-native.
As they returned to the hotel, Graham stopped to take a call with the Canadian young riders chef d’equipe in the front entrance. Twenty minutes later, a missile struck that same spot.
“We were having a glass of wine in the lounge when the intercepts started high above the city, say 10 miles above us. You could see the incoming Iranian ballistic missiles, and then the launchers from the UAE Defense Force intercepting and exploding these missiles above our head,” he recounted.
“We were watching it from the balcony on the ninth floor and there was an incredible explosion. Not only was it loud, you felt it—the whole place shook, and cups and dishes and wine glasses on the tables all spilled over.”
Graham went to check their seventh-floor room and discovered the hotel had been bombed.
“I watched the fire department put the fire out. Nobody was panicking. I texted my wife, ‘Hey, we just got hit, you should come down to the room. We need to pack a bag and be ready to go.’ We just made sure our passports were on us and stuff like that.”
Then, they went for dinner.
“There’s really nothing else to do,” continued the former paramedic and firefighter. Williamson’s background is in emergency aviation evacuation in conflict zones.
“They cleaned up the mess. I’d say most of the hotel guests decided to sleep in the basement of the hotel—everyone just took blankets from their room and stripped their beds and went and slept down there.”
Graham and Jennifer opted to stay in their room. At midnight, they awoke to a cell phone alert instructing them to take immediate shelter. A moment later, they heard a second missile fly by their window.
“I don’t even know how to describe what a missile sounds like,” he continued. “And then it slammed into the hotel down the road from us, the Burj Al Arab. It’s a seven-star hotel—the top property in Dubai.
“At this point,” he said, “we knew that the Iranians were targeting hotels where Westerners and tourists and Russians and Brits are staying.”
That, he continued, was a worrying detail.
“I used to rescue people all throughout the Middle East. I would deal with every scenario from Iraq and Afghanistan to evacuate U.S. military contractors out of conflict zones. This is definitely the extreme side of things because it’s a war being directed at civilians.”
The next morning in Dubai was subdued.
“The hotel was pretty desolate; most people just stayed below in the parking garage. But we just did our normal routine—we went to the pool and hung out. There’s really nothing else to do, and at that point we weren’t going to go too far from our hotel. You could see the F-16s patrolling the city.”
The attacks continued for the next five days while the Williamsons watched from the hotel pool and waited for evacuation updates from the airline.
“I have to give a hundred percent credit to the government in Dubai and to the UAE Ministry of Defence. The emergency services were absolutely top rate. As I was watching them, I was comforted—this is a professional force,” continued Graham, elaborating the military’s emergency response.
“The drones are about the size of a small Cessna airplane, and they’re loaded with explosives and fuel. They sound like a lawnmower basically—you can hear them coming—and then the F-16s will intercept them and shoot them down.
“We actually overlooked the port, and it’s an oil storage facility, so the city was quite smoky with a heavy, acrid smoke because they had a bunch of oil storage tanks that were on fire for a couple of days. Each night you’d be woken up with sounds of explosions.”
While the photos and video of the conflict are chilling, he said the city remained defiant.
“They light up the Burj Khalifa with the flag of the UAE and the flag of Israel. They were playing Adele’s ‘Skyfall,’ and there were thousands of people that were gathering,” he continued.
The hotel guests, however, were divided.
“The hotel was divided into two groups: those who think that we are crazy, and those that we think are crazy. And then we would all gather at the pool.
“Usually around 10 o’clock in the morning, the crowd starts to show up. People get their chairs, they lay their towels out, put on sunscreen, and you’re there till five or six o’ clock at night. And then dinner was on the patio because it’s a beautiful night—it’s 30 degrees.
“It turned into a very regular crowd.”
On Wednesday, the Williamsons got the call that the first flights would be leaving the next day.
“We showed up at four o’clock in the morning and they had lines by destination—there were five flights leaving that morning. It was like COVID times; there was not a soul in the airport,” said Graham.
The flight out was as unusual, following an emergency airspace pattern.
“Normally when you take off from Dubai you head up towards Iran and then turn left, but this time we just headed south and over Saudi Arabia. It was an immediate takeoff—quick, fast, high climb, turn left, gone. So it was operating under wartime conditions.”
The Williamsons landed in Spain Thursday evening, and the next day, Graham did what horse people do—he went to the show.
“We made it back to Spain. And not only did I not die, I didn’t miss my class,” he chuckled. “My horse Liverpool and I actually had the best three rounds of our career that weekend.
“What I’ve learned in my career in doing rescue missions all over the world is that you always have to be the calmest person in the room. Fear begets fear, panic begets panic. It’s the same thing with our horses—if we panic, they panic. You just got to go with the flow.”
